Memory sailboats: one design, four builders
"Memory" names a boat, not a company. The Memory 19 is a 19ft gaff-rigged daysailer that Tony Robinson designed for his own use, and it has since passed through the hands of four unrelated builders, none of whom worked from the same standing operation the others did. There's no single Memory yard and no continuous production line - just a set of drawings that different builders took up, one after another, over half a century. For a buyer, that makes the builder and era behind a given hull matter as much as the model name itself - there's only the one model, but its history runs in distinct chapters.
Origins and ownership
Robinson based the Memory 19 on the shapely, practical lines of small, shoal-draught fishing smacks from Brightlingsea, Essex, reworking a 1922 Essex fishing boat called Brownie into a design carrying all-internal ballast that reflects those workboat origins. Eric Bergqvist built the first examples, introducing a GRP version by taking a hull mould directly off an existing wooden hull - "seams, knots and all," in Practical Boat Owner's account - and the resulting boat, launched in 1976, became, by both Classic Boat's and PBO's account, the first of a now-familiar type: the 19ft, GRP-built, traditional-looking, trailable, gaff-rigged daysailer.
Building passed next to Liverpool Boat Company, and then, in 1996, to Salterns Boatbuilders, where Greg Dalrymple began building the Memory 19 as a complete boat rather than the bare hulls its predecessors had shipped. Classic Boat names Collars as the most recent builder, and reports that new building stopped not because the design fell out of favor but because good used examples remained plentiful enough that building anew wasn't worthwhile.
Construction through the eras
The bare-hull era came first: Classic Boat describes the early Bergqvist- and Liverpool-built boats as sold with only a deck and centreboard case, left for the buyer to complete, "with varying results." Liverpool Boat Co added a small cabin option along the way, and some home-builders fitted cabins of their own; separately, Practical Boat Owner records that the open-topped design was later joined by a version with a short coachroof and twin-berth interior. Consistency arrived only once Salterns took over: Classic Boat reports that quality became consistent under Dalrymple's building, and that boats were numbered for identification from that point on.
Two further details separate one Memory 19 from another regardless of builder. About half the fleet is keel-stepped and half tabernacled, a mast-step split Classic Boat attributes to no particular era. And the ballast, which sits all internal in keeping with the design's workboat ancestry, started out as sand before later boats switched to lead pigs stowed under the sole; later hulls also picked up internal buoyancy to meet Recreational Craft Directive requirements.
Who Memory is for
The design has a racing pedigree beyond its daysailing brief: Classic Boat credits it with more race wins than any other design in Old Gaffers Association competition. It has also carried some notable company - a Memory 19 appears in the 2001 Agatha Christie television film Evil Under the Sun, and past owners have included broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. Buyers should expect the count of boats built to depend on who's counting: Classic Boat puts the total at about 140, Practical Boat Owner at more than 130. Either way, a Memory 19 is a single design read through four different builders' hands - the model name is the constant, and everything else about a given boat, from hull completeness to mast step to ballast, is a question of which chapter it came from.